The prologue and tutorial battle should help you get a feel for your class. Some tips for how the game works :

-Unlike traditional RPGs, you do not receive up points when you level up, instead you receive AP from battles that can be used to level up your skills. Your character gets stronger mainly two ways : from leveling up skills and getting better equipment.

-There is a level up box in your inventory. Don’t rush to open it…you will find yourself running out of space quickly. It mainly gives you misc stuff like potions or secondary weapons. The earliest you should open it is level 10, for the free belt, and the next time at level 20, for a free +5 weapon. You get a second storage chest after you finish the battle “Decisive Battle”.

-Secondary weapons are mine bombs, small bombs and spears. Aside from getting titles, spears are mainly used to stun bosses and do break offs (for boss drops) and mine bombs are for mining ore deposits. Small bombs and chain hooks aren’t very useful.

-Titles can be equipped to appear over your character, and they usually have a minor stat boost. Most of them have pretty silly requirements, such as killing 500 of a particular monster with objects, and you shouldn’t rush to do it. Some do have pretty good stat boosts though, such as killing 25 spiders for kicks. You will also get more titles as you finish quests.

-Do not feel pressured to finish all the side quests for one episode before moving on. Most of these usually take a lot of farming or money to complete, and the benefits are fairly minor (some gold and xp). And if you complete all the quests, you will be too overleveled for the battles you are doing and receive a gold penalty.

-When you complete a battle, you get some gold, xp and AP. You get a penalty for gold if your level is too high for the battle, battle xp is divided among party members and AP obtained from a battle decreases by 5 everytime you do the battle. Everyday, there will be daily battles for each episode where you will get the full AP and there is no level penalty for gold.

-Oaths give you bonus xp and battle points. Battle points are used mainly to unlock additional battles down the line. In episode 1 and 2, you get 100 BP for most of the battles, so you don’t actually have to use oaths…and you shouldn’t, because the extra xp will quickly overlevel your character, giving him a gold penalty. The earliest battle where you have to gain BP for something is Dethone the white tyrant (50 bp for a quest).

-Starting from episode 2 onwards, your armor will start to degrade in dungeons. Keep it repaired or it will break often.

-Always bring mine bombs unless you need other weapons. You usually don’t need spears for breakoffs. Mine bombs allow you to farm ore, which is incredibly valuable as it is a key crafting ingredient. The first ore deposit is to your right as you enter the boss room in “Decisive battle”. Unlike evil cores, ores are split among the players in your party, so it may be best to run 2 man parties if you want to get ore.

-To get breakoffs, you can usually use spears, or hit the area with a powerful attack or object. For example, hitting the gnoll chief’s helm 3 times with a spear will break it off and get you the crimson rage helm. Its often easier to damage the breakoff point if the boss is stunned.

-While it may be tempting to farm a battle until the AP gets too low to make it worth it, don’t do this until you have revealed all the quests in the episode. Quite often, you are asked to backtrack to an earlier battle to retrieve a quest item..and you don’t want to do it with only 10 ap remaining for that battle.

-The warrior’s challenge oath reduces the amount of enemies you must fight, and makes the battle go much faster. A solo player can easily clear the battle much faster as the amount of maps is reduced to just two from 4.

Equipment

-Almost everything is crafted either at NPCs or by a player with the appropriate expertise skill. Don’t waste your money trying to buy the low level equipment from NPCs…they are junk. After completing the battle “Friends?”, you will get a free weapon, which will be your first weapon upgrade. You will also get free veteran gear as you complete episode 1.

-If you compare equipment stats, you will notice there is a LOT of gear in this game that is junk. For example, light battle mail vs crimson rage. By the time you can actually craft the light battle mail set, chances are, you can afford the crimson rage set or craft one yourself, and since the crimson rage set is much better, there is no reason to wear the light battle mail set. You can compare a item’s stats to the one you are wearing now by holding the shift key and mousing over it (may be alt key).

-Don’t try and craft everything yourself, check the market place. When you mouse over an item, you will notice it has the market place average sell price on it. That’s a good indication of how much the item is worth. It is often cheaper to buy equipment off the market rather than craft it yourself. Note that sometimes average prices get massively inflated by gold sellers selling worthless items at insane prices, so be careful, don’t rush to put up cloth at 100k each because the average price is that high.

-If you need a set to finish a equipment story, you can buy it off the market and then re-sell it for approximately the same price after getting the quest reward and title.

-In general, end of episode items are the best you can get at the current level and better than normal gear in the next episode, e.g. crimson rage is better than kobold winter and northern pike, despite being one episode earlier.

Skills

-Once you reach a certain level, you can complete a quest to get the meditation skill, which gives you 1 ap approximately every hour. This is very important, but do not level up this skill. It is not worth it.

-Important skills varies for each character, but a good guideline is to max your primary stat mastery as soon as possible. It makes a huge difference. For example, strength for lanns, fionas and karoks. Not only does it increase your damage, it allows you to lift heavier objects….which can come in handy to knock bosses down.

-There are many useless skills for each character. Don’t be in a rush to level up everything you can, ask for advice first.

-For most characters, you will eventually progress to wearing plate armor, so don’t try and max light/heavy armor proficiency.

Combat

-Elite mobs with red names do not “flinch” when attacked, but you can launch them in the air with certain attacks. Every character has access to air launching attacks. Use those to defeat elite mobs easily.

-All characters except evies can grab monsters and use a ES smash, which is usually enough to one shot a mob. Using a ES smash next to a wall or near some objects will give you invulnerability frames and allow you to regain some health, but this is usually much slower than drinking a potion.

-Wisps appear near erg pots and their evil cores may contain ergs/remnants.

-Erg pots, and other breakable objects, will generate erg crystals (red little crystals) that restore health. They are also one of the few sources of ergs and remnants, which are usually used for quests or crafting. You can also get ice crystals by breaking ice in hoarfrost hollow (very rare chance)

-Obtaining a SSS rank at the end of the battle requires you to have both SSS style and battle index. To get a high style index, spam style actions (ones that generate a style bonus, like a 4 hit combo + smash), for the battle index you need to do a lot of damage to monsters in the battle while sustaining no or few hits. The more players are in the party, the easier it is to get a high score as the requirements are lowered for each additional player. To get a SSS rank while soloing requires you to kill every single monster in the battle while sustaining no damage, not even falling damage, which is impossible for some battles. SSS rank at the end of the battle gets you 5 additional AP, lower ranks will give you a gold/xp boost.

-You do not need to pick up boss drops, they are automatically added to your inventory. Exception : if the boss name does not appear after defeating it, it is a mini boss and you must pick up it’s drops manually. E.G. The three vampire bosses in “Blood Prince” before the Blood Prince spawns.

-Throwing heavy objects such as rubble from pillars or ice chunks can do a lot of damage to bosses and help to knock them down. They do more damage the closer you are to the target before throwing it. Evie seems to have a much less powerful throw for unknown reasons (bug?).

-Evil cores or bodies may fall through the floor and become unlootable. Sometimes you can perform an AOE attack to get access to it, evie’s ice blast attack seems the best for this as it does AOE damage both upwards and downwards. Items such as ergs may be blown out of the map or into ceilings, they are unretrievable in that case.

-If a quest says you must get an item from a certain battle, it is actually referring to the boss, and you can get the quest item in other battles. E.G. Let’s say a quest tells you to go to “Ulcha’s Relic” to get an item. What it actually means is that the boss “Blood Drinker” will drop that item, and since the Blood Drinker appears in multiple battles, you can get it from any of them. If you need two quest items, the boss will only drop one of them each time. Warning : You can get multiple, redundant quest items. If your storage chest is full, a quest item can get sent to your mailbox. If you do the quest again, the game will check, see you don’t have the quest item in your storage chest, and give you another one, ignoring the one in your mail box.